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I’m the sort that instantly gets into my head that people should be “forever” fixtures in my life. I meet them and collect information, cataloging it in the storage rooms of my brain, and I believe that this is enough to keep them from ever going away. Such naive thinking patterns leave me with a broken heart, because some people are intended to touch your life like the hem of their dress brushing your ankles as they pass you by on the street.

Some people are stuck in transit. They are forward motion, and for a brief blip on the timeline of life, their lives and details meld, mix, and mash with yours. And then, just as quickly as they come into your life, they are gone.

It makes my heart ache, because too often I consider my life as a turnstile. People last long enough to only become a little less than strangers, before they are gone. I cannot put a number to this phenomenon, but I so often long to keep people long past their positive expiration date. This is the moment when someone in your life stops leaving a positive memory, but becomes a sulfuric, bitter taste on your tongue.

I don’t want to be the sort that is always seemingly stuck in transit. I don’t want people to count down the time before I leave because I always seem to keep my emotions in suitcases so that it is easier for me to skirt away in the darkness. I don’t want people to count me forgettable because I seem like the sort who takes the first train out of a place, because they don’t want to invest in something that seems so temporary.

I don’t quite know how to get around it, either. I don’t know how to grow roots down deep in a place, especially when I have prayers upon prayers that make me wonder if I’m supposed to have roots in situations, people, places that I encounter. I just know that I don’t ever want to be a number rather than a person. Or to ever regard anyone that way, for that matter. Even if it means that the heart break is a little more substantial when they depart.

Late nights, outside sounds of wind howling, this is the culmination of such things.

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2 thoughts on “The Culmination of Such Things”

“This is the moment when someone in your life stops leaving a positive memory, but becomes a sulfuric, bitter taste on your tongue.”

I love this because it hits so close to home. I recently dealt with a feeling of the sort. My best friend of eight years. He started dating my boyfriend DJ’s ex, who seems to get around quite a bit in our group of friends. I tried my best to make her a friend of mine, seeing as she made him so happy. I failed. She ended up jealous of me for being so close with him to begin with, and for dating DJ. She became, overall, extremely bitter. She took at least five of our friends to her “side,” and they conspired against me, trying to “get rid of me,” they said.

It’s been the ugliest year of my life. Filled with hurt and confusion. I have finally decided to accept that eight years of my life with someone I did nearly everything with means nothing now. Our rides in the Jeep to Yorktown Beach, the beers we shared at the Pub, the photography adventures; everything. Those memories are no longer positive to me. They’re not necessarily bitter, but I look back on them longing for the day the may come back to me.

That sounds incredibly ugly, Sarah. I’m sorry. I’ve had two tremendously ugly years, and have claimed this one as my time to shine. I motivated myself to lose weight, get healthy, and to choose happiness. I still struggle with not being sure that I’m in the city that I’m supposed to be, but I’m believing that these things will come to light.

I swear holding onto people is something I really wrestle with, but I’m learning that I have to stop hurting myself by forcing things that wind up being toxic and cost me more than they ever gave me.